Code Review Checklist Infographic

3 March 2015

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While you may think that code reviews are just big time wasters, they are useful indeed, especially when you want to catch bugs / find errors, ensure your code is readable and maintainable, share code among your team members, get new developers up to speed, or just expose your team to new approaches. I've recently bumped into an article by Gareth Wilson where he refers to the findings of the Software Engineering Institute Research that suggest that on average, each software developer makes 15-20 common mistakes. As such, he makes certain code review recommendations based on those mistakes. I've put his recommendations together into this Code Review Checklist that can be useful for anyone suspecting that something may be wrong with their code quality and consistency.

To sum up the Checklist, when doing your code review, make sure to break it down to 4 aspects: general, security, documentation, and QA and testing.

General issues that should be checked:

code readability and maintainability

code compliance with pre-determined conventions

absence of duplicates and redundancy

length of loops, etc.

In terms of code security, make sure to check:

all data inputs and outputs and encoding

use of 3rd party utilities such as plug-ins and add-ons

how invalid parameters are handled

When reviewing documentation, make sure:

all comments have been replied to and resolved

all unusual behaviors ever described have been addressed

use of 3rd party libraries is well documented

your data structures and units are explained

Regarding testing, make sure your code is testable and all tests are comprehensive enough, all arrays are checked for out-of-bound errors, etc.

What other issues would you add to this Checklist?

Source: https://blog.fogcreek.com/

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